Understanding the EU’s changing trade policy strategy towards the Asia-Pacific region from a role-theory perspective

The past decade has witnessed an increasing nexus between the European Union’s trade and foreignpolicy toward Asia. On the one hand, the EU has sought to deepen economic cooperation with its keyAsian partners since this region has become central to the EU’s economic growth. On the other hand,the EU has increasingly used its trade policy as a foreign policy tool to pursue its geopolitical interestsin Asia. Against this background, the paper seeks to examine the dynamics of trade relations betweenthe EU and its Asian partners by adopting the role theory. Using this theory, this paper aims to providea holistic understanding of how the EU’s changing role in the EU-Asia trade relations has affected itspursuit of economic as well as geopolitical interests in Asia

Urea Transporter Physiology Studied in Knockout Mice

In mammals, there are two types of urea transporters; urea transporter (UT)-A and UT-B. The UT-A transporters are mainly expressed in kidney epithelial cells while UT-B demonstrates a broader distribution in kidney, heart, brain, testis, urinary tract, and other tissues. Over the past few years, multiple urea transporter knockout mouse models have been generated enabling us to explore the physiological roles of the different urea transporters. In the kidney, deletion of UT-A1/UT-A3 results in polyuria and a severe urine concentrating defect, indicating that intrarenal recycling of urea plays a crucial role in the overall capacity to concentrate urine. Since UT-B has a wide tissue distribution, multiple phenotypic abnormalities have been found in UT-B null mice, such as defective urine concentration, exacerbated heart blockage with aging, depression-like behavior, and earlier male sexual maturation. This review summarizes the new insights of urea transporter functions in different organs, gleaned from studies of urea transporter knockout mice, and explores some of the potential pharmacological prospects of urea transporters

Two-Stream Regression Network for Dental Implant Position Prediction

In implant prosthesis treatment, the design of surgical guide requires lots of manual labors and is prone to subjective variations. When deep learning based methods has started to be applied to address this problem, the space between teeth are various and some of them might present similar texture characteristic with the actual implant region. Both problems make a big challenge for the implant position prediction. In this paper, we develop a two-stream implant position regression framework (TSIPR), which consists of an implant region detector (IRD) and a multi-scale patch embedding regression network (MSPENet), to address this issue. For the training of IRD, we extend the original annotation to provide additional supervisory information, which contains much more rich characteristic and do not introduce extra labeling costs. A multi-scale patch embedding module is designed for the MSPENet to adaptively extract features from the images with various tooth spacing. The global-local feature interaction block is designed to build the encoder of MSPENet, which combines the transformer and convolution for enriched feature representation. During inference, the RoI mask extracted from the IRD is used to refine the prediction results of the MSPENet. Extensive experiments on a dental implant dataset through five-fold cross-validation demonstrated that the proposed TSIPR achieves superior performance than existing methods

Wafer-Size and Single-Crystal MoSe_2 Atomically Thin Films Grown on GaN Substrate for Light Emission and Harvesting

Two-dimensional (2D) atomic-layered semiconductors are important for next-generation electronics and optoelectronics. Here, we designed the growth of an MoSe_2 atomic layer on a lattice-matched GaN semiconductor substrate. The results demonstrated that the MoSe_2 films were less than three atomic layers thick and were single crystalline of MoSe_2 over the entire GaN substrate. The ultrathin MoSe_2/GaN heterojunction diode demonstrated ∼850 nm light emission and could also be used in photovoltaic applications